A friend of ours, Randy Bevis, introduced us to the idea of running a barrelponics system at ISDSI. Randy runs a development project north of Chiang Mai city where they raise fish for stocking aquaculture ponds in local communities. We looked into the system, and found a great resource online at F.A.S.T with the barrelponics manual and more information on aquaponics in general. This January on of the ISDSI students from Kalamazoo College, Adam Smith, decided to take on the project, and as part of his J-Term independent study built a barrelponics system at ISDSI, where it is now running with fish (tilapia) and growing vegetables. It is a great small scale system, and we are going to run it and monitor the system to see how we can adapt it to urban sustainability projects — as well as provide fish and vegetables for ISDSI.
The basic idea is to link fish with hydroponic vegetable production, where the fish waste provides nutrients to the plants, and the plants in turn clean the water for the fish. The only input needs to be fish feed, since energy is taken out of the system in the form of plants and fish.
Here are some photos of the build and an explanation of the system.
The system before loading in the gravel for the hydroponic beds.
Adam linking together the grow beds and the fish barrel. The gravel deformed the barrels, so we added a strap to keep them from deforming too much.
Water from the fish barrel is pumped up to a float tank, and then as it fills a recycled water bottle, it opens a valve (the same as in a toilet) and water flows into the system. This shows the gravel beds and the fish tank.
The first test of the water flowing into the gravel beds -- the water flows in, and then drains into the fish tank before cycling back up through the system.
The whole system -- you can see the tank that holds the water, the water bottle that fills and empties to trigger the valve opening, and the pipes into the grow beds. You can also see the vegetables starting to grow in the gravel beds.
Before the vegetables were big enough to clean the water, Adam found the ammonia levels going up, so we went to the Ping River and pulled out some water hyacynth to help filter the water. (Lydia was more than willing to get her hands dirty and wet...)
The float tank with water hyacynth and water lettuce helping filter the water. We can pull these out as the vegetables get bigger.
Adam explaining the system to students at ISDSI.
Congratulations to Adam on a job well done!
